Miwok, Bairu, PYP, McCauley and Crashes

It’s Wednesday?? How did that happen? The kid is a little slow on the blog front this week.

Things have been pretty hectic lately with lots of stuff on the go. The Kingston 5Peakstrail race is a week from Saturday. It looks like there will be a good turnout for this second year event.

Last week was an amazing week in ultra running and also in Canadian running in general. Here are a few highlights.

Miwok 100km:This super stacked race turned out to be as epic as all of the prerace hype. Anton Krupicka ran a very well executed race to win in 8:02. Some of the most interesting parts of the day included what went on elsewhere in the top ten. Unfortunately, one of the pre-race favourites, Canadian Gary Robbins had to pull out after 50km. Read Gary’s excellent and honest report on his race (a must read!). Even without Gary finishing, Canadians ran very well with Chris Downie finishing 7th and Glen Redpath 8th overall. There are some excellent race reports on Rod Bien’s and Anton Krupicka’s blogs, plus a great interview that iRunFar.com did with La Sportiva runner Nathan Yanko who finished 4th.

Kami Semick had a great day at Miwok and one the women’s race in a time of 9:10.

New Canadian 10Km Record:Simon Bairu continued his fantastic season of running by setting a new Canadian record of 27:23 for 10km. This broke Jeff Scheibler’s old record of 27:36 by 13 seconds. Bairu will be making his marathon debut this fall and is looking to break the Canadian record at that distance too.

Pick Your Poison:The next race in the Ontario Ultra Series took place last Saturday. It sounded like the weather was a bit nasty at times again for this race, but some strong performances were turned in. SHA runners JD and Christy both ran strong races with JD completing the 50km and Christy completing 25km. Complete results are here.

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My Training Week:Now that I’ve increased my volume up consistently where I would like it to be, I’ve started to add more regular harder efforts into the mix. This has ranged from steady long efforts to tempo runs, with some hills thrown into the mix too.

I had my longest run since last September of 5:09 last Monday and even though it was longer than the week before, I felt much better structurally and my body held up very well. Thursday was a hard, hilly tempo run of 30mins in the middle of a run on a 1km loop. This felt awesome and I handled it well.

The week continued with some great volume and intensity with a run at McCauley Mt on Saturday while Brennan rode his mountain bike. I ran the first 20mins of my run with Heather who ran incredible on the hills, then I got in some more good climbing. Bren had a great time on the trails, but unfortunately took a nasty fall on his final run of the day, by hitting a hidden rut at the bottom of a hill. He went down pretty hard, but was ok and is proudly showing his crash to all his friends.

Sunday concluded a great week with a 3 hour trail run at Frontenac Park with Taylor. I was a little tired going into this, but luckily Taylor showed mercy on me and let me lead …he didn’t have much choice as he didn’t know the route . This run was at a quicker pace then I would have run by myself, which was great to get in. It was a hot day as well, so it took that much more out of me too. I had a few nigglies at the end of the week, so looking forward to a few lighter days to re-charge a bit before going long again.

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